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Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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D
Welcome back to New Books in East Asian Studies. This is a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Mark Baker from the University of Manchester here in the UK and I'm delighted to be hosting today Professor Xiaobo Liu to discuss his new book Domination and the Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era, published just a few months ago with Cambridge University Press. Professor Liu joins us from UC Berkeley, where he's Associate professor in the Department of Political Science. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:40]
E
Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark, for the introductions, and I'm very delighted to have the opportunity to discuss my book with you and then the broader audience at this podcast.
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D
For those who haven't come across the book yet, Domination and Mobilization is a fascinating comparative study of the two major political parties in China in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. On the one hand, we've got the KMT, sometimes called the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai Shek, and the Chinese Communist Party, which came to be led by Mao Zedong. Domination and Mobilization is a really forensic reconstruction of how both parties operated and how it was that the much smaller Communist Party came to lead a successful revolution in the 1940s at the expense of the KMT. I don't want to preempt our discussion by telling you the book's answer to that question. Let me just say that Domination and Mobilization is a hugely stimulating exploration of that question, both in its overarching model and the nitty gritty of some fascinating empirical details. I've been thinking about this period for several years and it gave me a lot of conceptual food for thought and also some pointers for how my teaching on this period has has perhaps not quite been right. So I'd like to start as a first question by asking you about the origins of the book. I was interested in the acknowledgments that you mentioned. You'd originally been thinking of working on the CCP and the KMT and their state building efforts after 1949. So what was it that pulled you back to the Republican period before 1949?
- [04:19]
E
So this is a great question to start this conversation. So my original interest SEO I mentioned was centering on the state buildings by the CCP and KMT after 49 because I was trying to understand how both parties start with a clean slate trying to build the states. But during the process, my research, whether digging into the archive or interviewing various historian and political scientists, I cannot escape the lingering questions about the legacy from the CCP and KMT's previous struggle during the pre 49 era and everything start pointing to that direction, trying to understand how their past experience shaped their strategy and thinking about the estate building in the post 49 era. So the more I look into the pre 49 era, I can become more intrigued because I found many unanswered questions. For example we all know that the kmtos engineer conflicts but why was the CCP immune to it? And as we discussed later, the answer is no, right? The CCP also have a lot of elite conflict early on and at the same time if you look into the kmt, they follow pretty much the same wisdom today considered by the study of authoritarian politics when it comes to power sharing, when it comes to co op elites, still they failed. And more importantly, as I look into this period as a political scientist, I found that actually the pre 49 China is more comparable to many failed states and authoritarian regime today. Like they have intense power struggle with opposition parties. There is a weak institutionalized environment. Those central government is only have only power in the city, in the urban area, but very weak in the proliferay. So in that sense I found this period fascinating trying to understand the political developments in China and beyond. So that kind of plummeted into this period study. So that's I guess is one thing to summarize is the serendipity is really the process, the process of researching research into this topic.
- [06:34]
D
Great, thank you. I'm glad you mentioned the comparative aspects actually because this really isn't a book just for people who are interested in China. There's all kinds of interesting comparisons and ways of thinking about other similar political circumstances. Revolutionary parties, authoritarian states and so on. Before I ask you to explain the overarching argument of the book, I wonder if you could help listeners just explain a couple of the key concepts. One of the key concepts is the difference between party with a dominant leader and a party with a contested leadership, which I think is fairly self explanatory. But I wonder if you could explain a bit more about the difference between two different types of mobilization between elite centric mobilization and mass centric mobilization. What's the difference between this elite and mass? And how do we. How do we know it when we see it?
- [07:36]
E
So that's a good question. I think the way I was thinking about this distinction is that well put ourselves in the shoes of anyone or to start a political organization. Okay, so there's two ways to think about it. One way to do it is trying to incorporate existing political and economic elites into the organizations because you can take advantage of their resources, social networks and other endowments to help you build up organizations. So that's what I consider is elite centrics basically incorporating existing political and economic elites or religious elites. Or what you can do is especially in for revolutional party or political organization trying to challenge the existing status quo. What you want to do is start to build a mass mobilization infrastructure at the grassroots level to recruit ordinary citizens and people in the lower social stratus in order to challenge existing power structure. And that's why called the mass centric mobilization infrastructure. So the way to think about them is that they basically targeting different segment of the population and treating those individual segment of the population as the core member of the party to help them accomplish the desirable outcome that are preferred by the party.
- [09:06]
D
Great, that makes sense. So with that in mind, this difference between elite centric and mass centric mobilization and dominant leader versus contested leadership. I wonder if you could just explain the core argument of the book how a dominant leader and mass mobilization can help us understand the rise of the CCP at the KMT's expense.
- [09:30]
E
So that's I think the the way I was thinking about this because is when it comes down to how can we build an organization to seize state power. So eventually what I think we come down to is focusing on the people and then the organization capacity. So by people I mean specifically about the dynamics and then the balance of power among the leaders of that organizations. And by organization capacity, I focus on the characteristic that the organization can mobilize key resources, whether we're thinking about human resources or financial resources. So a good analogy of my arguments trying to think about, okay, let's say we're in a car race, race car, F1 or NASDAQ. So to win the race you need a good driver, but you also need a car with powerful engines. So essentially what I'm arguing that a dominant leader is this good driver, right? So when it comes to the party building, so there's always a free rider problem, meaning that other people do not want to use their precious resources devoted to the party building because they're hoping someone else can devote their resources. And then there's also distributional conflict, meaning that when you build a party sometimes might benefit one region or one faction of the party over the other and someone in the leadership contestation might be envious about or hesitant to devote their resources. And of course we were talking about a period with uncertain outcomes and it's not always going any party building effort is going to pay out. So in that case, when you have many people, when there's no dominant leader and there would contest leadership. So imagine driving a car with many bad seat drivers, right? In that case it's going to have detrimental impact on the way that the party formulate a strategy to implement those strategies to strengthen the organization. So when there's a emergence of a dominant leader and they can alleviate this conflict by in a way to put down the disagreement among party. It needs everyone work towards the same goal. Okay. In that case, you alleviate the free letter problem and also mitigate the distribution of conflicts. And with the dominant leader pointing the direction to go, that can also help people to forget about the uncertain outcomes. Now, having a dominant leader is important, but it's not sufficient. You also need to have a powerful organizations, especially at the grassroots level, as well as the top level, to able to mobilize key resources for the party. So conventional wisdom, when we talk about political party, we've been thinking about recruiting mobilizing the activist, the follower, the revolutionary into the party, the human resources. But one thing that I try to emphasize in this book is that yes, mobilizing human resources is important, but at the same time, activists, revolutionaries cannot fight with empty hands or stomachs. So in this case you need to have a mass mobilization infrastructure or elite mobilization infrastructure to mobilize financial resources. So in some way building a party is like building a state that you need to be able to penetrate to extract key resources to strengthen the party. So that is what the key arguments in my book is, that for the party to develop a strong mobilization infrastructure, you need to have a dominant leader. And then for the party to dominate, you also need to develop a mobilization infrastructure to extract key resources. So that's hence the title of the book in thinking about domination and mobilizations.
- [13:45]
D
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. That's the two keywords in the title. The domination of that key leader and then the mobilization of resources by the party. And the book, the empirical core of the book explores this really in two parts. Chapters 3 and 4 are looking at the mobilization aspect and then chapters 5 through 7 looking at the party leadership. We might not quite have time today to go into every one of those chapters, but I do think chapter three is really important in taking us back in time and helping us understand some of the background. So thinking about chapter three, I wonder if you could explain some of the different challenges faced by CCP and KMT before. Well before 1937, say when full scale war with Japan broke out. So what were the challenges faced by the two parties before 1937 and how did they try to solve them?
- [14:46]
E
Sure. So I think they face a different type of problem at the early stage of its party building for the ccp. Actually they're very similar to many other revolutional parties who were born weak. That has been documented by recent book by Levitsky and Wake. Thinking about the legacy of a Party for an Oliver conference. So early on to expand the party infrastructure you need financial resources, but at the same time to extract financial resources you need to have a powerful massive organization infrastructure which they do not have. So in some way that the and especially early on, as documented by historians and other political scientists, Communist ideology is not, you know, naturally draw a lot did not draw appeal from the Chinese citizens at the time. So they have a very slow growth at the beginning and they are at the mercy of the foreign assistant from Comintern because they rely on Comintern for financial resources as well as some strategic guidance. So Comintern actually have a lot influence on EV selection and subsections and that led to the conflict document. On the other hand, for the KMT, the main challenge for them is actually like many other states today where you try to build institutions in the weak states where the previous infrastructure has been demolished or weakened. So actually the KMT took the pragmatic approach by co opting existing elites and to give them credits. They have actually done a pretty decent job during the period from 27 to 37 to build state in a very challenging environment. And this has been documented by other scholars like Arthur Young, Julia Strauss and Elizabeth Eramic. But the problem of their strategy is that they giving up building a party mobilization infrastructure at the grassroots level as a way to corrupt elites and then they concentrate their physical extraction in the coastal and urban China and as I document later in the book that actually they become the seeds of their destruction once the Sino Japanese war broke out.
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D
Thanks. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about this interesting moment when for a few years as many listeners will know, the CCP and the KMT were working together in the first United Front and both getting some support from the Comintern from the Soviet Union. Because this is a very interesting moment in the history of the KMT when for at least a couple of years there is at least on the KMT left mass mobilization strategy. So I wonder if you could just explain a little bit more about how that came to an end and how and why the KMT really turned away from that towards the elite centric mobilization of the next 10 years.
- [18:07]
E
So I think one important thing we should think about is the KMD started out founded by Sun Yat Sen many people consider as the Father of the nations, right? And he helped organize various revolutionary organization to overthrow the Qing dynasty. And he is three people's principle the ideology, even though it's very inclusive. Actually his approach is very elitist because he have this famous saying that there's some part of populations that can see the future will be the leader of the new China and most of the populations in China people need to be awakened. So to start Shin Yat Sen have a very elitist approach when it comes to building a party and was not very successful in as has been documented by others. So it's during the 1920s to 23 when this comet and the Soviet agents start to approach Sun Yat Sen saying that well let's you know, we will give you military aids as well as financial aid help you to fight a warlord and in return you need to form this united front with the ccp. So this has been well documented by Tony Sage and other people's work by the First United Front now. So this is actually important departure for the KMT's party building strategies moving into start to build a mass mobilization infrastructure. But because of this first united fronts they actually the KMT elites delegate the task of building mass mobilization infrastructure to the CCP members and they mostly occupied the leadership position at the top. So after Xin Hexing passed away in 1925, there's a secession battle. Jiang Kaise was actually initially not in the competition because he did not start his career in the party. He started his career in the military. So Jiang I said actually was able to lavish in this conflict between the KMT left and KMT rights. So he first built this coalition with party elites in the KMT left to push out the KMT right in the secession battle. So Wang Jingwei start able to become the party leader. But Jiang Gatsu start to sense this challenge within the party coming from the CCP because they start accumulating a lot of power within the party and also he sends these coalitions between the KMT left and CCP. So in 1927, Jiang Kai said took the faithful decision to work with the KMT right to eliminate the CCP inputs and from that point in order to prevent the CCP infiltrations or any lingering impact of the CCP or KMT labs so they start to dismantle the mass mobilization departments within the KMT and at the same time Jungkook assets during those times start to work with the financier and then people in the banking and financial sector in in the eastern part of China later this have been documented by Park Cabo's excellent book about the Shanghai capitalist. So it's in that way that in some sense the KMT start to distance themselves from a mass mobilization because they want to make sure their party is different from the ccp. So that fateful decisions in the shadow of elite contestation led KMT to the elite mobilization infrastructure from that point onwards.
- [22:19]
D
Thank you. And that takes us into the 1930s really where as you've already laid out, there's this interesting moment where the CCP are really struggling to find a mass mobilization method and infrastructure that works. And the KMT are as you say, in difficult circumstances doing pretty well building up a certain kind of taxation base in certain provinces with this support base of quite a mixed group of elites. But then in 1937 full scale war with Japan breaks out and that takes us to chapter four. Chapter four was probably my favorite chapter of the book actually because it does a very good job of comparing the two parties mobilization during the war with Japan. Particularly zooming in on this moment around 1940, 1941 when after a few years of conflict both parties in their different areas of China have a real revenue crisis, a real crisis of financial and food mobilization. So what was the, what's the comparison between how the two parties responded to this and what was the difference in their responses?
- [23:43]
E
So let me first explain what type of financial crisis face both parties because they actually face a different type of financial crisis for different reasons for the kmt so being the face of the, you know, the ruling party so they share the solder the burdens of finding the Japanese raising revenues. But at the same time because of the Japanese invasion they were losing the territory in the coastal China and northern China which has been their revenue sources 75% of pre war revenues. Think about the custom revenues, think about the salt monopoly and then the consolidated tax came from the region. So in other words, the financial crisis was driven by losing the territory to the Japanese and those territory were their revenue sources starting in 1937 for the CCP. Actually from 1937 to 1940 they did not have a severe financial crisis in part because the second United Front give the CCP actual effect revenue boost from the foreign assistance as well as the financial assistance from the kmt. So you know, you look at the revenue sources in San Ganing where the party headquarter located up to 7 to 80% of their revenue at the time came from the foreign or KMT assistance. Now 9040 is the turning point where with the Wannan Shi Bia where the KMT and then CCP troops clash in Anhui. So the KMT overnight withdrew all the aids. So think about overnight the CCP phase of financial software 70 to 80% of revenue was gone. So as document in My book so the KMT has tried to from the starting 1937 use different way to mobilize resources. They for example, they take several reforms, try to expand direct taxations, they try to tax the. They call it excessive profit of the business. And they also try to start the mobilization of building the industrial sector. But at the same time the strategy did not work. And they also include monetary, monetary supply and which create a lot of pressure to generate inflations. So they start to think about one of the untapped resources in China at the time is the land tax. Because in the early 2007, during the process of state building, KMT negotiate with the regional strongman decides that they let them take control of the land tax. In return, they those regional government start to submit to the kft. So they realized that they have to centralize the land tax as the last source of revenues to help them finance the war. And then CCP at the same time realizing that they also have to tax the peasants because their revenues were gone 70, 80% overnight. And they tried different strategies, try to, you know, increase money supply by issuing their own currency, also try to impose indirect taxations but that both lead to inflations. And actually it was quite severe in several area up to 100% in certain area and also in two of the base area in Sanganing and Qingshui. And they tried to use opient growth opium to subsidize some of the revenue loss. So this has been documented by a lot of scholars elsewhere, especially Tse Yong Fa's work from the academic syndicate in Taiwan. So let's start with this turning point in 1941 when both parties were forced to extract grains from rural China. So in this case that the CCP used their party infrastructure at the grassroots level to mobilize peasants to help them address two key issues when we think about taxation. The first one is assessment, meaning how much grain did the rural household produce? The other one is compliant. Now that you know how much grain they produce, how can they get them to pay? So through my research I found the CCP have many trial narrows but essentially they found a winning strategy which is by manipulating the tension within society. So they first create a prisoner's dilemma when it comes to grain extractions. So the specific strategy they use is to organize a public, they call it democratic meeting. So all the household come together in the public meeting announcing their green outputs. Now in that situation within the village, so say Mark, you and I were in the meeting. So I start to become worried that if I misreport Underreport Migraine Productions. You're going to expose me. Why? Because I know if you underreport, I will expose you. Right. So this is like a classic prisoner's dilemma where the people in this public meeting fearing the under report could be exposed by their neighbors and force them to review the true output. Now, once we report outputs, say we're coming from a village with a lot of social capital, right. We can hide those output together because we have a trust among each other. So actually that's one of the issues the ECCP ran into in some village. So to overcome that strong social capital in some village that they protecting each other. So another strategy they use is create zero sum gain. In other words, that they have a sophisticated formula, but in the end is that someone under report their gain, others have to pay more. So the essence of this strategy is that through this type of mass mobilizations and they manipulate the tensions within the society and making taxation. Traditionally it was a state society tension become a tension within the village. So in a way to adjust mitigate the challenge in assessment and compliance. The KMT story is more straightforward. I would say that they use this indirect rule, delegate the tasks of grain extraction to local elites. And that led to a lot of inequity and inequality because as a local elite, they will put the burdens on the peasants. So in the end, even though they achieved some success, like the level of grain extraction amount to about 5 to 6% of grain production, which is quite remarkable considering historically that the central government was only able to tax about 2 to 3%. But for the CCP, my research discovered through the party archives that in some area in Jingshui, for example, close to 20% of the grain production was being extracted by the CCP. And in Sangading, it's more than 10%. So it is more than twice, three times more than they can be able to accomplish. So I think this really set the divergence when it comes to building the infrastructure to extract resources in both areas controlled by the CCP and kmt. So that is really how both parties the differences when they come to responding to the financial crisis.
- [32:11]
D
Yeah, and that means, I guess that certainly by 1945 the two parties look quite different organizationally and in what they're able to do at the grassroots level. We might come back to the period after 1945 in a few minutes, but I think that the last few questions have helped us understand the trajectory of the two parties in terms of the mobilisation aspect of the book. I want to move now to just Ask a couple of questions about the domination aspect and the party leadership in comparison with each other. And here I'm taking chapters five and six together, which are both looking at the ccp. And I wonder if you could explain briefly to listeners why the rise of Mao was so important from about 1935, his emergence as a dominant leader within the CCP. Why did that make a difference compared to the CCP before that period? And how was the CCP different after that transition?
- [33:21]
E
So that's a great question. I think this is one aspect has been overlooked in the existing studies. So if you look through the party archive from 1927 to 1935, you find many conflicting and self defeating strategies announced by the party center at the CIS NGO at the CIS B. The reason is that there's intense elite competitions, especially when the combat turn have a really huge, significant, profound impact on elite selections. Many of a party leader try to appeal to the combatant by pursuing radical policies and excluding after 1927, downgrading, excluding the intellectual, rich peasant and prioritized worker. Where in China that was not really practical strategy at the time because China was largely an agrarian society. So Juni meeting at the beginning of the Long March is the one of the crucial meeting when Mao returned to the CCP leadership circle. And of course at the time he was not immediately became the immediately become the party leader. Zhang Wentian was the leader, but Zhang was a intellectual who was happy to delegate power to other people with expertise. So Ma was in charge of the military along with Zhou and Lai. But Zhou and I fell ill during the times of Mao became the de facto leader. So during this time you start to see a shift in party building strategy as Mao started gaining more power. Just look at for example the status of the rich peasants. And before 1935, they denounced rich peasants and denounced intellectuals and saying that they are not a good candidate for party. But you start to see a shift of party building and recruitment strategy embracing rich peasants and intellectuals. And as Mao continued to consolidate his power, you start to see new party recruiting strategies start to criticize the previous. They call it the closed door strategy. And so that's where the CCP start to embrace the peasants, transform itself from a party that prioritizing workers to a party prioritizes peasants. You can see clearly the sequence of event within the ccp. So I think this is a crucial period when Mao start becoming a leader. Not necessarily because his charisma or his foresight strategy, which definitely play an important role. But more importantly that when he later able to Eliminate the challenge from Zhang Guotao during the Long March and Wang Ming later that put himself in such a status within the Party. No one can challenge him. You can start to see the Party work together and actually have a more coherent set of strategy and stop the infighting or self discriminating policies. So that I would say 1935-37 is the crucial period for the CCP to turn around, start to lay down the foundation, become a stronger party.
- [36:49]
D
I think that helps listeners and readers think about two things. First, how the emergence of a dominant leader goes together with the emergence of successful mass mobilization in the sense that it's the dominant leader who's able to promote a broader base of mobilization. And then second, I think it also helps us understand how contingencies come into this picture where it's not that the CCP leadership is sitting around thinking we really need a dominant leader here, but there may be an element of that, but really it's more a question of rivals falling by the wayside and things may be changing in Moscow and various things which are clearing the way for Mao's rise to power during and after 1935. So I wonder how the KMT compares to that leadership picture. How is it that in comparison with the CCP and this dominant leader, elite conflict, somewhat contested leadership are affecting party building in particular within the kmt. And I'm giving you lots of questions here, but you also mentioned at the beginning of the interview really this interesting question about what you call a free rider problem within the KMT in particular. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit more as part of your answer, how the free rider problem is holding back party building for the kmt.
- [38:26]
E
So I think the key problem from the KMT is that. So they took this pragmatic approach, right? Try to during the north expeditions, even though they won some in the battlefield, but also they tried to preserve their military power by using cooperations to get other workload to put down the gun, but basically to become a party, right? So by assimilating all these elites into the party imagines that you have so many ambitious people in the room and the natural question is who's going to be the leader? And that's where elite conflict become inevitable for a party with elite centric mobilization infrastructure. So in this case, imagine that in this period the KMT have a different faction, different regional strawmen, and they do not see eye to eye. They do not necessarily embrace a stronger party. For example, the regional strongmen resist the KMT's party building in their Territory they worry about. This is a distributional conflict I mentioned earlier. They worry about building a stronger KMT party could end up my dear power within those regions. So I'm thinking about in Guangxi, Sichuan and elsewhere. At the same time within the party the free rider problem emerged where that and the you know, thinking about okay, if you want to build a stronger party sharing power and that might need someone else, would you take the resources? I'm not going to put my resource building a stronger party that eventually could benefit other elites. So you start to see there is a conflict within the party elites who should put resources which party organization should emerge within the party. And the free rider problem was so severe to the extent that they start the elite were focusing more about putting themselves in the high position within the party and state institution instead of putting effort in building the infrastructure at the grassroots level or connect to the society. So essentially when you put together all those powerful ambitious individuals in the room, their primary concern in the KMT case is that whether or not that strategy is any part of building strategy is going to undermine the own power. So you start to see KMT pursue inconsistent policies when it comes to party building. And so much so that Jiang Ki said was so fed up with the party that he started other organization trying to appeal like the youth into the KMP party. This is something similar to today's Communist Youth League but in the KMT case but they actually created more conflicts because then now there's two organizations. One is the kmt the other is another organization that use us the green. Well no, the is like a two people's principles League competing to recording creating internal conflicts. So in the end I think one thing I want to emphasize is that the KMT the faithful decisions to departure from the mass mobilization infrastructure and bringing all the elite box themselves into this situation where there's unrelent the conflict among party elite when it comes to building a stronger party.
- [42:15]
D
Yeah, and I think that probably contributes to the sense that the KMT in the 1930s is becoming either a vehicle for other interests or really existing in some places existing only on paper.
- [42:32]
E
With.
- [42:33]
D
You know, with paper paper membership that really isn't doing a great deal in terms of party activism. So I suppose that leads to the question of whether the KMT could have done something different or whether Chiang Kai Shek could have done something different. At a certain point I think we tend to. I certainly do this when I'm teaching. I think I tend to think about KMT mistakes. But actually in some ways it sounds like for the most part they're doing the right kind of things for an elite centric mobilization party in power.
- [43:11]
E
But.
- [43:11]
D
In the end are just overwhelmed by contingent events particularly, particularly the war with Japan and then the CCP's comparatively strong mass mobilization. So without going too far into the what ifs, do you think there is anything that either KMT as a party or Chiang Kai Shek as a leader could have done differently?
- [43:34]
E
So this is a question that historians or political science have been asking the what if questions. Right. So the way I think about this is there's a debate whether this leader are eventful men or event making man in other words, whether their choices are constrained by external events, their rise or demise or whether they actually make those events to facilitate their rise or fall. So I would say in this case KMT actually been doing the right things when it comes to power sharing, when it comes to cooperations and when it comes to political control of the masses. And as you look at the literature of authoritarian politics in political science those are the go to strategies that people consider for resilient authoritarian regimes but the problem of that is could Jiang Gaise have done a better job? I mean there is something that he could have done to alleviate internal conflicts but the whole structure factor by putting so many ambitious powerful people that with their own resources when it comes to financial resources, when it comes to military power, putting all those people in the same room and it's hard to build these coalitions so the counterfactual I like to think here is that what if the KMP leader is Mao rather than Jiangai said right? Mao has been considered this party leader with the charisma of foresight and strategies right? Really helped the CCP turn around. So let's just for the sake of a thought experiment thinking about what if Mao is the party leader for the kmt well I'm not sure Mao would have done a better job than Giang guy said holding the party together if he were the KMT leader. So another thought experiment to see is that when KMT retreated to Taiwan actually many of the elites that creating problem from Jiangai said either get captured or defeated or die in the battlefield in mainland China or flat China decide to not to go to Taiwan and move elsewhere and that clear a lot of obstacles for the KMT party when it comes to Taiwan and Jiang I said finally become a dominant leader within the KMT and from that moment and onward he start to lower his guard not being so skeptical about other people's strategy that may potentially within his power and actually trust the bureaucrats and the people around him more, allowing them to devise strategy to build a stronger KMT party for its domination in Taiwan later. So I think this is really the bring back to the argument that you need a dominant leader at the early stage. When you have a contested leadership it's really hard to manage this coalition. And even if there is a coalition, it's a really unstable equilibrium because any party elite at that moment will like to seize any opportunity to outmaneuver their oppositions within the party. So this has been showing elsewhere in Peru and in Etrecat as I briefly mentioned in my book that you know, with elite centric party it just prone to elite conflict that undermine become an undermining factor for party organizations.
- [47:20]
D
Yeah, for what it's worth, I think I agree with you. I like the thought experiment of Mao as head of the kmt. It sounds like a bit of a fever dream, but I think it's quite a helpful way of thinking about it and I think it makes us realize just how complicated, how complex and multi sided the problems are facing the kmt. Maybe thinking particularly of during the war with Japan. Seems like in some ways, you know, the CCP have all kinds of problems and Mao has problems, but it seems like in some ways it's slightly more, it's kind of three dimensional rather than four dimensional chess, partly because of not having to grapple with so many different kinds of elite within the party umbrella. You touched there on the post 49 period. And I wonder if we could maybe close with that as a question about the legacies of this story after 1949, which you explore a bit in the closing chapter of the book. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit for listeners about why The CCP after 1949 was in some ways, and I'm quoting here, a victim of its own success. And how does that legacy still affect China today?
- [48:44]
E
So this is something that circle back to the original interest in this topic and trying to understand the state building by the CCP and by the KMP in China and mainland China and Tamil respectively. So tracing their strategies to the pre 49 struggle. One thing I start to see is that during the intense struggle Mao did play an important role helping to transform the CCP to allow it to overcome all those obstacles. So it is true that without Mao I don't think CCP will be standing today. But the reasons that Mao was able to help the CCP the party transform itself partly have to do with his foresight and charisma and strategy partly have to do with his status being a dominant leader. But many people give credit to his foresight, wisdom and later thinking that for the party to survive to secede, they need a dominant leader. And that has been the curse of believing a savior, so to speak, or hero for political organizations and putting a blank faith of that they can do no wrong. And as you can see in the politic 49 era party elite tolerate and sometimes even endorse the emergence of a personal account surrounding Mao after 1949 optimally create many, you know, quick disastrous policy that, you know, completely turned the society upside down from during the Mao era. So this is the belief in the dominant leader as a savior is still, I think lingering in the new party is thinking. And we can look at, you know, people look at Deng Xiaoping for example, and even to today's Xi Jinping's era, that many people see that Xi as the savior to help the party navigate the untrodden water in some way that, you know, really people start still hoping is the people rather than the institutions to strengthen the state, strengthen the organizations. The other, I would say the victim of its own success element is when it comes to the strategy the CCP learned to implement unpopular policies. So during the grant extraction, they use what I call it the mobilization compliance, meaning that using the party to help carry out implement unpopular policy and green extraction being one of them. And by relying on these strategies and later you start to see CCP use political campaigns, mass mobilizations and when they come to policy that could face potential resistance and that really undermined institutional building. Because as you look at every campaign, there's always a moment when rule of law being pushed aside and in the end is really the end justified. The means use whatever methods to accomplish that particular goal. And it was quite successful to some extent that EC many political campaign achieved the goal that the party tried to accomplish. But at the same time it really undermines the legitimacy of institutions and then also undermine the institutionalization of policymaking or citizen compliance. Because they now have the expectation that when it comes to campaign, rule of law is no longer serving as the guiding principle for people's behavior. So in that case, the curse of a believing and dominant leader and rely on the mobilization compliance mass campaign as a convenient tool for policy implementation, I think is to really become the legacy of the CCP's early struggle in today's political systems in China.
- [53:00]
D
Thank you. And just picking up on a book that you mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation, the book called Revolution and Dictatorship by Stephen Levitsky and Luke and Wei, who are looking at these questions of how violent revolutionary parties can turn that to a durable form of authoritarianism. That book came out Revolution and Dictatorship came out a couple of years ago and also featured an interview on the New Books Network on the Political Science Channel. So listeners can maybe go and have a listen to that or have a look at that book as well and think about how in some ways this violent success can maybe be a bit of a double edged sword for authoritarian regimes, particularly where the dominant leader, as in the China case, survives for decades after the party comes to power. So just as a closing question, is that something that you're specifically researching now or have you moved on to different projects?
- [54:07]
E
So that is a really good question which I've been thinking myself. So some idea I've been exploring is trying to understand the legacy of a party building during the early stage of state building in mainland China and Taiwan. But as I was doing this research, there's one I would say weakness of my bookman's group that an area that I have not explored is the role of the military. During this period, the relationship between the party and the military is also a very important role. And then even look at today's China. The military play a profound role, not just maintaining orders, but you look at the infrastructure, you look at the public good provisions. When you come to other dimension of society, you still see a lingering effect of the military. And I would call it this, the, you know, besides the party and then the state, the military is the third leg for us to understand the political system in China. And it does not only serve as the coercive apparatus, but also serve as another important functions like ging the party and the state together. During the Cultural Revolution, the military is the only stable organizations because the party collapse, the state collapse. Right. So in any event, I've been thinking about this question quite a lot, but at the moment there's just some ideas. But this might be an area that I might want to look a little bit closer later.
- [55:48]
D
Good, we look forward to that. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Professor Lu, for joining us today. Lots of lots of stuff for listeners to think about, I'm sure. And please do get your hands on a copy of Domination and Mobilization from Cambridge University Press. Much recommended for political scientists working on these questions as well as anyone interested in the history of modern China. So thank you for joining us. Thank you to Professor Liu and we'll see you next time on the New Books Network.
- [56:19]
E
Yeah, thank you so much. Mark. And this is a great conversation. I really. And you're glad to have the opportunity to share some insights with the audience and the new Book Network. Thank you.
- [56:32]
D
Thank you very much.
- [56:47]
E
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D
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B
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